>Eventually there simply won't be enough work to do for 100% of the population to do something

People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do. Who would have guessed when the Earth's population was 1 million people that'd we eventually have billions of jobs.

So there is really no reason for there to not be enough work to do. If each person consumes enough in life to equal once person's work output, then every additional person will work enough to get enough to consume for themselves by trading with others.

As long as people can trade the result of their effort for the efforts of others, there is no reason we will ever run out of jobs. In fact, there's likely now and always will be things we could do except we simply don't have enough workers to do it. Each big technological change in the past freed workers from previous drudgery and opened up large swaths of working people to provide labor for the next wave of innovation. There's no need innovation ever ends.

This scaling has always worked, from societies of a few people to countries with a billion people. And there's no shortage of work still to be done.

> People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do.

Ah yes thank god we have more paper pushers in hospitals than doctors. Otherwise who would push the paper?

It's a good thing we have plenty of needed jobs, even when the everyday person doesn't understand reasons for those jobs, to the point of confusing their own ignorance with misguided malice to the workers doing jobs they don't understand.

It's the modern equivalent of tribespeople throwing rocks at the moon.

A good place to learn in life is when you don't understand why something exists or how it works, instead of immediately writing it off with intellectually lazy hatred and dismissiveness, spend some time understanding what came before, what problems the current solution solves, and why things are as they are. You'll be amazed and the nuance and insights generations of clever people solving problems have passed on for situations you currently don't see or understand.

You'll end up happier and have a better understanding of the world.

It's quite a different thing when up to 40% of the workers themselves think their own jobs are unneeded:

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jo...

... and when people think quoting David Graber is an accurate assessment of reality. Or simply google ample rebuttals to Graber's entire thesis, well backed with empirical evidence, such as [1], "Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs", which categorically demolishes this stupid line of claims via careful empirical research across large numbers of people. "The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."

And a large amount of people believing a thing are not the same thing as truth, as evidenced by countless mass misconceptions from the trivial to the insane.

The problem with ideas like this, just like any number of wild ideas, is that they're easier to manufacture than accurate explanations, so there's more of them, and people with itchy brains love to latch onto them, but they pass by over and over without people actually realizing they're all the same nonsense - wishful simple explanations for complex phenomena.

And then people regurgitate it over and over on the internet because it sounds nice to them, but they cannot be bothered to see what follow-up actual scholars did to debunk it.

For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...

But that has happened exactly zero times. And will happen zero times more. Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?

I believe reality.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067

> For example, if all these jobs are bullshit, then start a company with none of them, and crush all the others since they're wasting sooooo much time and money and resources...

Awesome to see a person in real life who thinks all markets are perfectly competitive and that there’s no such thing as anticompetitive behavior or fixed costs.

The invisible hand of the market works if everyone has perfect information and fair terms.

> Awesome to see a person in real life....

Awesome to see a person in real life given the chance to jump on a land mine just do it full heartedly :)

This is precisely why I asked "Care to explain why short of invoking massive Illuminati world conspiracy nonsense?".

And you jumped right in on cue.

None of your excuses stop thousands of companies from starting and succeeding every year. Yet none have removed the bullshit jobs claimed, making them even better, more efficient companies.

So your bogeymen are pulled out by you to justify a worldview mismatched from reality to sustain the belief (discredited as I pointed out above by ample academic empirical research) that so many jobs are bullshit, despite such easy evidence to the contrary, and, like all conspiracy Illuminati beliefs, self contradictory with even the evidence that companies start all the time.

Congrats.

It's easy to start a company - there are literally millions of them in the US, with thousands starting weekly. Nearly all have fixed costs, face the same marketplaces, and yet every year 100's of them get so big they float public IPOs. Most of the Forbes 400 richest people are first gen company founders, facing all your bogeymen that, I guess by your logic, would make it impossible to make successful companies.

So why are none of them smart enough to remove all these bullshit jobs and become even more efficient? Maybe because they are all actually smart enough to realize where the actual bullshit is in these claims.

>People always claim this, yet with ever increasing population, we continue to find work for people to do.

The reason I expect employment to eventually be much less than 50% is automation not population growth. In the past when one industry gets automated people move to another industry, but I don't see how that happens when/if we have human level AI.

Agreed. My understanding is that around the founding of the United States, something like half of the working population had jobs relating to producing food (farming, fishing, etc). Today it's something like 1%. As agriculture has gotten ridiculously efficient, that's freed up more of us to invent computers or vaccines or TikTok dance trends or whatever. Of course we still need truck drivers to deliver this abundance to our homes (something like 5-10% of the US working population, depending on whether you just count truckers, or Amazon drivers, or gig economy delivery folks, etc)...

But if we make it to a sci-fi future where robofarms produce foods with little involvement, robotrucks transport goods with little human involvement, housing is built by mobile 3D-printer-bots, using materials mined by robots, etc... it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.

I don't believe we've reached a point where UBI makes sense, but it's interesting to me that even if we were in this sci-fi everything-is-plentiful-and-automated future, some folks still think only the people that happened to be born at the right time and into the right circumstances to own and/or operate these robots should reap the rewards. The unlucky who didn't happen to own shares of RoboInc or land one of the scarce jobs ought to subsist as a member of a wretched underclass?

> it's easy to see where the basics could be so easily provided that it would seem (to me) morally repugnant not to provide them to everyone.

Whilst I agree, the definition of basics keeps expanding in scope. Once it was food and water, then it was nutritious food and clean water, then we tack on shelter and medical care and electricity and internet and education and clothing and transport. So this point where we can easily provide the basics to everyone seems somewhat mythical. Our poorest people live in comparative luxury compared to the people of 500 years ago but we still call it poverty.

yeah its debatable that many white collar jobs fit the definition of "providing value" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job]

and the things that people actually value (lots of creative ventures) tend to be greatly undervalued to the point its hard to support ones self unless your and elite few

It's not going to be half of the population. We are approaching a world where 1% can contribute useful work and the other 99% cannot contribute anything beyond entertainment. Then the question is why should the 1% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power for 100% of the work?

Why should the 99% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power/wealth? I think the core issue is wealth inequality, and although I initially liked UBI, it doesn't really solve that issue. If we don't solve it, I wouldn't be surprised to see a situation where we end up with another failed attempt at communism/revolution and everyone loses.

> Then the question is why should the 1% accept a governance structure where they get only 1% of the power for 100% of the work?

A job doesn't entitle you to power.

If they think they are underpaid, they can ask for more money.

If the wages of that sector go up a lot, watch as half the world applies for those jobs.

I think the implication of the parent comment is a world in which only the smartest 1% are able to do things that can't be automated by an AI.

It's not specifically what was written, but it's what I see between the lines.

That's a weird definition of "useful work" though. If they're not farming or manufacturing or distributing or maintaining things then why should they get significant power?

And if 99% of the population is too dumb to do it, then it probably doesn't need to be done.

>And if 99% of the population is too dumb to do it, then it probably doesn't need to be done.

This is very hard to believe. That's basically conceding that we will never cure cancer/colonize mars/solve productive nuclear fusion etc.

Damn, you really don't have a high opinion of the bulk of the world's population. You really think it takes special geniuses to do those things, not just experts? 125 IQ need not apply?

IQ 125+ is a bit less than the top 5%.

The country with the highest percentage of PhDs is Slovenia, at 3.8% of 25-64 year-olds.

I know academic performance doesn't perfectly equate to IQ, especially at this level because right now smart people have many other options, but on the other hand that's the highest percentage and the OECD average is just short of 1.1%.

OECD PhD percentages: https://doi.org/10.1787/888933978645

China I'm not sure about, but seems to be about 500k/year, so if I estimate population of 1.5e9 and 80 year life expectancy, that's a steady-state level of 3.75% of the entire population.

So the minimum for those things being above IQ 125 seems at least plausible. May not be correct, but it is plausible.

Farming, manufacturing, distributing, and maintaining things are all directly getting automated. The fist stage of this automation, when the automation wasn't computerised, was named "the Industrial Revolution", but automation didn't stop there, and computerisation is continuing to reduce human involvement in each sector.

As for "why should they get significant power?" — well, 'should' is a question of values. Do you believe in democracy and self-determination? Or is it fine to treat them all like animals, by which I mean spay, neuter, euthanise without asking their opinions, and/or selectively breed to be decorative and fit into handbags? Because the worst horrors that Charlie Stross and Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison have imagined are all as easy as Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism if you have an AI which can automate almost everything, regardless of whether anything remains purely in the domain of a tiny elite.

I'm going to support democracy. That's why I think an unemployable 99% should have, in a reasonable sense, 99% of the power.

I think you might have misread me. When I said "significant power" I meant that in a proportional sense. The 1% getting much more than 1%. I wasn't arguing against the 99% getting 99%.

Ah, thanks; that explains the apparent discrepancy between what I thought you were saying here vs. your other comments.

As for why the 1% may have much more than 1% of the power in practice… that's kinda where I was going with the Hyper-Dystopia vs. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism example: whoever controls the AI gets to play as Gods to a much larger degree than mere billionaires get to act like real life is a Civilization/KSP/SimCity game, and the default for who controls the AI is whoever has skills such that they can't be replaced with an AI. Or the current rich, if everyone can be displaced by AI.

Which 1% of the population are you counting as doing useful work? From how I see it - those doing useful work right now are compensated far far less than those doing well paid but useless work

indeed, there is a lot of useful work that people could do that is currently not paid well. for example education, science, healthcare.... imagine what we can achieve, when all those who are not needed to sustain our life study science and research or medicine. parents need not work but can focus their entire energy on raising their children.

or a different model, if 1% need to work 40 years to sustain us, then 10% can do the same while working only 4 years, or everyone only works one year. (ok, it doesn't scale like that because it takes more time to get experience for certain tasks, but even then, with such an abundance of available labor, every worker can spend half of their work time to teach others about their work)

all it takes is an understanding that the best thing to do with those not needed for work is to educate them to do something else that is useful for us.

thank you, this is exactly what I was trying to say but worded so much nicer

True. Also, reciprocally, why would the 99% accept a governance structure where they get 0% of the governance?

If the 99% need the work of the 1% but the 1% do not need them, then they have no leverage and must accept what is offered.

Well, not that I'm advocating for it, but if 99% feel oppressed by 1%, you should expect a revolution.

The scenario here is one where 99% of people's jobs have been automated out, so I'm kind of assuming that there are tons of robots and the 1% are somehow necessary to control the robots. And then there can't really be a revolution because the 1% will just tell the killbots to kill the rebels.

Don't forget that violence is always a possible outcome.

I'm not certain of any specific percentage, but here's a thought experiment:

Imagine there was an AI which was normal compared to a human mind — as in, you can reasonably assign it an IQ score the same way you would a biological human, and the score wouldn't be biased by it doing the maths and memory puzzles a million times faster even as it fails a simple word game or is unable to either count or subitize a small number of objects in an image.

IQ scores are normally only valid in the "+/- 2 standard deviations" range, which by definition is IQ 70 to 130.

(IQ tests are just a direct mapping onto standard deviations, not at all a linear scale, so while I'm very impressed with ChatGPT, I don't know if it would always outperform an IQ 70 human or not, even though it can definitely sometimes outperform IQ 130 human).

Assume this AI's electricity bill is equal to Example Everyperson's wages.

If the AI has an IQ of 70, then 2.3% of the population are permanently uneconomical through no fault of their own; 85, then 15.9%; 100, then 50%; 115, then 84.9%, 130, then 97.7%.

What is the likely IQ of the first human-like AI whose electricity cost matches an average salary? And how fast is it likely to go up?

~~~~

From the other direction: I don't know for sure how much ChatGPT costs to run, though I think it's in the order of cents per response. What I do have is an upper bound for Stable Diffusion of $0.0001 per image, less than half of the $0.00022 it takes to keep a human (on the $1.90 per day UN abject poverty threshold) alive for 10 seconds to type in the prompt[0].

I don't know what the future of AI will be, but I suspect that it will be so cheap that that won't need to be a superior intelligence to all humans in all domains, to cause literally all humans in all domains to be uneconomical.

[0] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...

This is a pretty shrewd comment. It won't matter if an AI is more capable than a human, if it costs more to run that task than it would to hire a human. There are still people working in mines in poor countries because they're cheaper than the machines used in rich countries.

Those people with IQs below 70 are already uneconomical. I don't know where the line is for "we can find productive work for this idiot", but it's definitely higher than "cannot tie/Velcro shoes"

If military standards are anything to go by, it's roughly IQ 83 by law. Standard requirements are closer to 91, those this is a rough equivalence.

The military found that people with lower scores were not even up to correctly sweeping the floors consistently.

The actual test is not an IQ test but the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which has rough equivalents to IQ scoring.

We can all agree that poverty and homelessness are a problem.

Where most of us disagree is on what should be done about it, and whether the problem is severe enough to warrant government action at all.

If more people are homeless when the economy is bad... fix the economy. If more people are jobless when the economy is bad fix the economy.

Saying "people are homeless, we have to fix homelessness" does not have a logical follow on that the way to fix it is to make everyone poor. It doesn't even follow that throwing money at the homeless would fix homelessness, especially when other prerequisites to having a home still fail to be met (like the ability to care for a home, or the self-control not to spend the money on things other than housing).

That doesn't mean don't try, but we need evidence and data to recommend policies not idealized fantasies of UBI.